Our Man in Panama

Earlier today, President Obama released his 'long-form birth certificate' on the premise that doing so would enable American political discourse to move on to more important matters. Here is his explanation from the official White House transcript:

We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

Before we put the 'birther' issue to rest forever, I would like to offer my thoughts on how this rubbish started during the 2008 campaign. You see, one of the two major-party candidates for president had the problem of being born outside the United States. I am speaking, of course, of John McCain, native of Panama.

What's that you say? You did not know that John McCain was born in Panama? I wonder why. Every reference source agrees. According to Wikipedia, for instance, John McCain was born on August 29, 1936 at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station, Panama Canal Zone, where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., was stationed. I should point out, for what it's worth, that McCain has always refused to release his birth certificate. [Update: McCain did provide his birth certificate in 2008 to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire in the case of Hollander v. McCain (2008), which challenged his eligibility to serve.]

Although Panama is obviously not part of the U.S., are U.S. military installations abroad in any way, under any statute or provision, 'part' of the U.S.? Is someone born at a U.S. military installation abroad somehow 'in' the U.S.? In a word, no. Let's take a look at the United States Foreign Affairs Manual, Volume 7, §1113, entitled 'NOT INCLUDED IN THE MEANING OF "IN THE UNITED STATES"'. According to paragraph (c)(1),

Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities abroad are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not born in the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

Why is it such a problem for a presidential candidate to have been born outside the U.S.? According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The truth is, no one knows for sure what this clause means. No court has ever ruled on it regarding presidential elections, and legal experts are divided. (See summaries of facts and opinions here and here.) In the absence of clear constitutional or jurisprudential guidance, a president born outside the U.S. could be subject to suspicions of constitutional illegitimacy.

Aside from the obviously racist intent, the point of accusing Obama of being foreign-born in 2008 was to draw attention away from McCain's foreign birth. And it seems to have worked. Far more people have heard the lies about Obama's birthplace than the truth about McCain's. Once Obama won the election, the lie took on a life of its own.

I doubt that Obama's statement and document release today will be the final chapter in the history of the 'birther' conspiracy. But I do believe that the need to draw attention away from McCain's 'birther' problem was the first chapter.

cause for enthusiasm

My latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily is available for your reading pleasure. It is on the question of the so-called enthusiasm gap among Democratic voters.

Don't laugh: saying the same old thing works

The Repulican Party released a new campaign document this week called 'A Pledge to America'. It is nothing more than the usual boilerplate Republican rhetoric, as demonstrated by John Stewart's cleverly edited segment showing House Republicans using the exact same words in years past. That repetitiveness is what makes it an effective propaganda tool.

The last time the Congressional Republicans made such a fuss about a document rollout was in 1994, when they launched their 'Contract with America' en route to taking over both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. Like the Pledge, the Contract also parroted earlier material, specifically President Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address, its main source. The joke, unfortunately, is on the Democrats, who, year after year, fail to articulate a consistent message.

It is easy to make fun of the Republicans' rhetorical recycling, but nothing wins campaigns like memorable catchphrases and the appearance of consistency. The content of that consistency is almost irrelevant. Many people will vote for the candidate about whom they can say 'I know what he stands for' even if what that candidate stands for is inimical to a voter's self-interests. That was one big reason that people found it hard to pull the lever in 2004 for John Kerry, the presidential candidate who had trouble getting a consistent message out: people went with the known rather than the unknown, even if they knew that the known was quite bad. It also worked for the guy who said little more than 'Hope' and 'Change' in 2008.

The Democrats' biggest problem is not that they think too much but that they do their thinking in public. Yes, the problems we face are complicated, but most voters don't want to be reminded that their leaders are full of doubt and circumspection. I, for one, am a big fan of doubt and circumspection, but it doesn't sell well on the national stage.

Self-fashioned thoughtful types can go on laughing at the Republicans' same-old, same-old tactics, but they work. If ever the Democrats started using Republican tactics to sell Democratic policies, the Republicans would be finished.

Update: the upcoming Congressional elections

I stand by the spirit of my blog posting of June 30: the Democrats will not face disaster in the 2010 Congressional elections in part because the Republicans are running a pack of clowns. After last week's final round of primaries, now is when predictions can be based more on data and less on speculation. What have we learned so far this year?

1. The Teabaggers did indeed cost the Republicans potential opportunities to pick up seats in the Senate or securely hold them. In Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, and Nevada, RNC-backed candidates, including some incumbents, lost to Teabaggers with lower electoral prospects. (And Republican Senator Bob Bennett lost his primary to a Teabagger in safely red Utah.) Democratic interim-appointed Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado could still lose his seat, but the Democrats could also make otherwise unlikely gains in Alaska and Kentucky.)

2. Generic Congressional polls are worth a lot less than polls about specific candidates. Because most Americans have weak-to-non-existent party identification, one would think that professional commentators would disregard generic polls and that there would not be much of a market for such polls. One would be wrong. Some people seem to be discovering this fact fairly late in the game.

3. No one knows what is happening in Florida. Despite early hopes that Governor Charlie Crist's independent, Lieberman-esque campaign would overtake Republican Marco Rubio's, the worst possible scenario is emerging: Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek are splitting the left-of-center vote. Someone will have to step down or Rubio will step over both of them on election day.

4. Expected Democratic strengths in North Carolina and Ohio have dissipated. I expected Ohio to follow the Northeast in its regional red-to-blue purge, a long-term trend matching the South's earlier blue-to-red purge. That no longer seems likely. Nor can we count on North Carolina's oddly cursed Senate seat to flip for the sixth consecutive election.

5. The so-called Democratic enthusiasm gap remains to be demonstrated. The states with competitive Democratic primaries that I checked had respectable turnout. In Kentucky's primaries, for instance, 514,173 Democrats voted, compared to 350,783 Republicans.

I remain optimistic, despite the polls, that Pennsylvania will not go red, let alone to a candidate, Pat Toomey, who could not beat Arlen Specter in the 2004 Republican primary. Likewise, I expect New Hampshire's Democratic transformation to continue. As Wikipedia reminds us, the 2006 New Hampshire state legislative elections 'gave Democrats majority control of both chambers for the first time since 1874, 14-10 in the Senate and 239-161 in the House'. After the 2008 elections, New Hampshire's State Senate became the first state legislative house in the U.S. to have a female majority. New Hampshire is set to take its proper place in the coming all-blue New England, preferably sooner rather than later.

I don't take seriously concerns about California and Illinois, although I confess to being bewildered and worried by the suddenly declining poll position of Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Let's hope the most recent poll proves to be just a blip.

The race to watch: Lousiana, where Republican Senator David Vitter's sordid past looks like it might be ready to catch up to him at long last.

What really matters in the end is not predictions but actions and dollars. I will be contributing money to Senate campaigns in the closest states, as should you. Here are some suggestions:

Wisconsin, Russ Feingold

New Hampshire, Paul Hodes

Pennsylvania, Joe Sestak

Kentucky, Jack Conway

Colorado, Michael Bennet

American elections are all about money. If a better Congress is worth paying for, then let's have the best Congress our money can buy.

defying history

I wish I had said this publicly in 2009 when it would have been rejected by far more people as preposterous: the Democrats could very well wind up with sixty or more seats in the U.S. Senate after the 2010 elections. And while I'm at it, I may as well go on the record with this prediction, too: there is no way that President Obama loses the 2012 election.

Everyone loves to repeat the conventional wisdom that the Democrats will lose this year either because the president's party almost always loses the first midterm elections or because so many Americans face hard times. But in order for Democrats to lose, someone has to win. The problem for the Republicans is that they are not running winners this year. The Republicans suffer from what I call the talent gap: they don't have the talent to win voters' confidence, even with purportedly high levels of dissatisfaction with incumbents.

The Republicans will definitely win some Senate seats currently held by Democrats. These are the Democratic-held seats most vulnerable to flipping, in order of probability of flipping:

North Dakota
Arkansas
Indiana
Nevada
Colorado
Delaware.

That's a total of six seats. Of the six, North Dakota and Arkansas appear to be certain losses. Indiana is likely to go red, but Republican Dan Coats's recent past as a bank lobbyist won't help him win votes. Nevada looked like a loss for Harry Reid until the Republicans nominated crazy Teabagger Sharron Angle. Colorado has yet to hold its primaries, but the same outcome is looking likely there, too, now: Teabagger Ken Buck may defeat the Republican establishment's choice, Jane Norton. Delaware is unusual this year. The state has only one House district, held by Republican Mike Castle since the 1992 election. That means that Castle, despite being a Republican, has a history of winning statewide election in Delaware. But Delaware is a solidly blue state, and Biden will campaign hard to keep his former seat blue. (I don't consider California or Pennsylvania at all likely to flip, despite what other bloggers are saying.)

Now let's consider the states with chances of flipping from red to blue this year:

Ohio
New Hampshire
Florida
Kentucky
Missouri
North Carolina.

That is also a total of six seats. From Ohio to Maine, every open seat for the past decade or more has gone from red to blue, and some incumbents have even been defeated (Al D'Amato in New York, Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, off the top of my head).* This is a long-term trend that I will discuss in greater detail another time. Suffice it to say for now that both states are highly competitive this year. In Ohio, the Republican nominee served as George W. Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2006 to 2007. I envy anyone who gets to run against Bush's former budget director. In Florida, Charlie Crist looks set both to win and to caucus with the Democrats: another case of a Republican sent into exile by the Teabaggers. Kentucky's Republican nominee, Rand Paul, is also too much of a Teabagger nut to win statewide election. In Missouri, the Democratic nominee is a Carnahan, part of the state's leading political dynasty. The seat in North Carolina is the famous cursed seat, which has changed hands in each of the last five elections, and the Democratic nominee is Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, thus someone with a history of winning statewide elections.

Realistically, I can see the Republicans picking up North Dakota, Arkansas, and Indiana, with any other state being a stretch. The Democrats, meanwhile, could realistically pick up all six states on my list. Could the next Senate wind up with 62 Democrats? If it does, you heard it here first.

*Update: Yes, I forgot about Scott Brown when I wrote this yesterday. If the Democrats run inferior candidates, as in Massachusetts this year, they should indeed expect to lose.

election night drinking game

This weekend on the drive back from campaign work in Pennsylvania, my friends and I wondered what would be the best word for drinking games during election night coverage, i.e. the word that, when said by someone on television, would be the prompt to take another drink. Although I myself have never played a drinking game, I came up with what I thought was a good answer: 'landslide'.

What do you think, Reader? What should be the word for drinking games on election night?

John, do you need a ride to the airport?

Trust me. This will be worth your time.

Click the link and watch all nine minutes of this. Then tell me whether it's over.

the master of deception chastises his bad apprentice

Last week, in a blog comment thread, I noted deep differences in McCain and Palin's style of lying, as opposed to Bush, Cheney, and Rove's, and I predicted that McCain and Palin's lies would ultimately hurt them. Here is part of what I said:

'Bush and Cheney don't lie like McCain and Palin. Bush and Cheney obfuscate, evade, obscure, and so on. Example: they say they don't torture and they get away with it because they redefine the word and Democrats roll over and let them do it. The actions of Bush, Cheney, and Rove can be shown to be lies, but it takes some work. They lied about John Kerry, and he let them.

McCain and Palin are stupid liars. They lie about selling a jet on Ebay or being a friend of special-needs families or opposing the so-called Bridge to Nowhere: all unsophisicated lies and with no veneer of national security as cover.'

(Correction: The above suggestion that Palin is not a friend of special-needs families was based on a misreported story about budget cuts in Alaska to special-needs programs. In fact, she appears to have increased such spending.)

How unsophisticated is McCain's lying? Even Karl Rove, the master of deception, has publicly faulted McCain's lies. Here is the video and the relevant transcript from Rove's appearance on Fox, as provided by Talking Points Memo:

WALLACE: All right, and for fair game, what is McCain doing that goes a step too far?

ROVE: Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads—similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test.

Rove does not object to lying per se. What he objects to is bad lying, i.e. lying that makes the liar look bad, which is what McCain has done.

I have been saying it from day one and I will repeat it again: John McCain is too stupid to win this election. He is not pretending to be stupid like George W. Bush, alumnus of Yale and Harvard. McCain is the real thing. His choice of running mate looks to some, in the immediate term, like political genius, but time will soon tell how smart it was to pick someone whose X-ray vision from Alaska to Russia invites ridicule.

I have heard people wonder whether McCain's innumerable contradictory policy statements indicate senility or Alzheimer's. What the question misses is that this man, even in his youth, was never sharp. He contradicts himself because he does not have a head for policy or detail or knowledge in general.

I expect Barack Obama and the liberal 527 groups to come out with a barrage of McCain (and Palin) flip-flop ads showing, with video clips, all the things they were for before they were against—and some that they were later for again. If Obama and company fail to do this, then they will not deserve to win. If they do it, the election will be won in large part on the stupid lies and dull-wittedness of John McCain. Enough is enough.

527's unleashed

Presidential campaign ads by liberal 527 groups have started to appear. If this ad about Palin's support of aerial wolf-hunting is any indication of what's to come, it looks like the left is bringing a gun to a knife fight.

Barack Obama said he would do this back on June 13, 2008, as reported by the New York Times:'"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."'

Sarah Palin a wildlife-hater? Release the hounds!

rope-a-dope

The verdict is in: Barack Obama is smarter than the rest of us. Throughout the 2008 campaign, many of us, including me, have wondered whether Obama had the anatomical-metaphor-of-your-choice to give as good as he gets from his opponents, be they the Clintons or John McCain. Two days into the Democratic National Convention in Denver, we were still wondering whether the party was going to play nice or play to win. John Kerry and Al Gore offered fighting words against the Republicans, but Obama saved the hardest blows not for his surrogates but for himself. He not only hit hard but he demonstrated his fire more convincingly than ever before. In that one standout word in his Denver speech—'Enough!'—he announced he was ready to throw down.

Today, amidst all the lipstick traces, he went one better by declaring 'Enough is enough!' Not by coincidence, he has now given the green light to liberal 527's to hit McCain with everything they've got. I, too, was skeptical when he tied their hands earlier this year, but consider the advantages of forestalling the attack until now:

1. By waiting until McCain's attacks reached new depths of disgrace, Obama can claim he was forced to release the hounds: the Republicans made him go negative.

2. By holding all his attack cards until now, Obama has not yet begun to fight, which means the best anti-McCain weapons are all still in the Democratic arsenal and will be deployed in the final weeks, when they count most.

3. Following from point two, the Republicans have exhausted their most potent weapons against Obama: there is nothing left to say about Jeremiah Wright, 'Hussein', 'present' votes, Bill Ayers, and so on. What is left to say against Obama?

Obama may have looked soft up until now, but I predict that all those soft-spoken weeks are about to seem like strategic genius. When the final chapter of this campaign is written in the history books, its title is likely to be 'Rope-a-Dope'.

spunk is not enough

Why have Republicans welcomed John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate? We know that he chose her after meeting her only once, in February. We know that she was mayor of a town of only 6500 people before being elected governor of Alaska, population 680,000, in 2006. We also know that her husband was a member of an Alaskan secessionist party until 2002. It is one thing to think that women are dumb enough to support Palin just because she is a woman. But many Republicans genuinely seem to like Palin and to think that somehow the rest of us will, too. What are they thinking?

Today's Republicans don't seem to care about competence, intelligence, or achievement. To them, ideology is the one and only measure of a candidate's worth. Yes, many Republicans share Palin's opposition to abortion under any and all circumstances, her refusal to believe in global warming, and her belief in creationism, but that is true of many in the party these days. Most Democrats support Barack Obama because of his Democratic agenda, but he is also an impressive individual who, by his achievements and special talents, inspires confidence. The Democratic Party generally does not run unqualified, unintelligent people for national office.

Let's look at the tale of the tape. Obama, with no connections and only one parent, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law, where he was president of the law review. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He mastered the bare-knuckled politics of Chicago and served eight years in the Illinois state legislature. Joe Biden similarly made his mark on the world by his own efforts and at a young age. Elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of twenty-nine, he has distinguished himself on both the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees.

John McCain, as the son and grandson of navy admirals, relied on the affirmative action of his connections to get into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he graduated 894th out of 899. His ignorance and embarassments in economics and international affairs are widely known. Palin has no valuable experience to speak of and professes to know nothing about Iraq or the office of the vice-president. Like McCain, she appears to have been a lackluster, uncommitted student, in her case bouncing around a number of schools without distinction. From Wikipedia:

'Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College — now known as Hawaii Pacific University — in Honolulu for a semester in 1982, majoring in Business Administration. She transferred in 1983 to North Idaho College. In 1987, Palin received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho, where she also minored in political science.'

McCain and Palin are mediocrities in every way, and mediocrities have no business leading the free world. I see voters on television and in the press speaking about how they identify with Candidate X or Y, but this is not a suitable way of choosing elected officials. We don't need the common man or woman in positions of national leadership. What we need is the uncommon man or woman. The president and vice-president should be total freaks: individuals of daunting achievement and visionary intellect. We should be in awe of their talents, not ridiculing their eloquence and intelligence.

From what I can tell, Republicans really seem to think that Americans will support Palin just because she looks like a crazed Tina Fey. One word that has been repeated a lot is 'spunk'. Here is an instance from the Los Angeles Times for September 1, 2008:

'"She's spunky," said Gail LeMay, 58, a retiree. "She really brings life to the campaign." LeMay marveled that McCain looked "to the tundra" to pick his running mate.'

We don't need a president who is spunky and we don't need a president who is funky. We need a president who is smarter than the rest of us because the problems we face will require intelligence, judgment, and skill to solve. Spunk, alas, is not enough.

Huckabee wins West Virginia

It's no small thing that the Clintons have beaten Barack Obama by a big margin, 67% to 26%, in yesterday's West Virginia primary, but if losing West Virginia means danger in the general election, John McCain has at least as much to worry about as Obama.

West Virginia is one of those quirky states where the Democrats and Republicans follow different procedures for choosing their party's presidential nominee. As the New York Times website shows, West Virginia held a Republican caucus on February 5 and a Republican primary yesterday. The results deserve our attention.

In yesterday's Republican primary, which determined nine pledged delegates, McCain won 76% of the vote. That means that in a completely uncompetitive primary, 24% of Republican primary voters showed up just to vote against their party's presumptive nominee. (I noted the same trend last week in Indiana and North Carolina.)

But in the February 5 Republican caucus, when McCain faced active competition with eighteen delegates at stake, the results were staggering. These are the vote totals of the delegates at the state convention, as shown by the New York Times:

Candidate	Vote	Percentage
Mike Huckabee	567	51.5%
Mitt Romney	521	47.4%
John McCain	12	1.1%

Some readers may say that it is a cheap parlor trick to compare Obama's 26% in the West Virginia primary to McCain's 1.1% in the same state's caucus. And maybe it is. The better comparison may be to the Republican primary in Utah, a reliably Republican state where one candidate, Mitt Romney, was favored by voters from the start. In Utah's February 5 primary, McCain got 5.4% of the vote to Romney's 89.5%. Does this mean that, having lost Utah so dramatically, McCain cannot hope to carry it in November? Certainly not. And neither does the Clintons' lopsided victory in West Virginia rule it out for Obama. Keep these facts in mind when you hear all the silly talk about Obama's 'electability'.

So that's what Obama's big defeat in West Virginia doesn't mean. As for what it does mean, your guess is as good as mine.

typing fingers crossed

A few weeks ago I applied to cover the Democratic National Convention as a blogger. If accepted, I would have press credentials and I would blog directly from the Convention in Denver. Today, I received a followup message from the Democratic National Convention Committee asking me for more information because they are considering my application.

I know that I don't have the eyeball counts of the big blogs like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, but perhaps there is room for my, for now, modest little blog. I'd like to think that I provide keen analysis that is well-written and that one will not find elsewhere. I don't repeat what everyone else is writing and blogging about unless I think I have something particularly insightful to add to it. Like the big blogs, I do original research into Congressional hearings, judicial decisions, and United States law, not to mention my many blog entries drawing on my knowledge of Islam (and hip hop).

I've long thought that a big problem with news and political commentary in this country is the narrow range of expertise that it draws on. Turn on any news or chat show and, ten times out of ten, you will see journalists interviewing other journalists or party apparatchiks. Turn on the equivalent program anywhere else in the world and you will often see—hold on to your hats—historians, political scientists, and regional experts offering their own insight and analysis. What is interesting about watching one journalist talk to another about the election when both of them have the same knowledge, come from the same professional background, and share the same paradigms and assumptions?

I want this opportunity not just because it would be a blast to probe the convention for the angles and insights less covered elsewhere, but also because, at a time when one of our candidates is under attack for having an elite mind, I would like to show American news readers the difference that serious, rigorous analysis can make, particularly when it is written in highly readable prose with healthy dollops of wit. There is a market for what I am doing, and going to the convention can help me find it.

Obama has already won

Here is something to keep in mind as we wait to see which Pennsylvania prevails in today's Democratic primary election: the Clintons were supposed to win from the start. The story here is not Barack Obama's inability to knock them out, despite lacking the winner-take-all formula of Republican primaries. The real story is that Obama has already defeated the stranglehold of the DLC over the Democratic Party.

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, is the list of DLC chairmen since its founding in 1985:
Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri (1985–1986)
Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia (1986–1988)
Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia (1988–1990)
Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas (1990–1991)
Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana (1991–1993)
Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma (1993–1995)
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut (1995–2001)
Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana (2001–2005)
Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa (2005–2007)
Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee (2007–present)

For those who follow American politics closely, the names on that list speak for themselves. The DLC approach to politics is to follow the Republicans ever rightward on the false assumption that the country is going ever more conservative. DLC candidates generally forgo the party's progressive legacy, repudiate appeals to the poor and working class as 'class warfare', and beg conservative voters to trust Democrats again by 'getting tough' on core Democratic constituencies. Bill Clinton did this in 1992 by executing Ricky Ray Rector with great fanfare and scapegoating Sister Souljah. And what did it get him? 43% of the vote in 1992 and a Republican Congress two years later.

The Democrats cannot win with 43% of the vote anymore, at least not without Ross Perot. And the party won't win the electoral college with the Kerry-states strategy of the Clintons.

Obama has already slain the beast inside the party and will win the nomination. What matters is not whether the Clintons beat him in safe Democratic states like Pennsylvania but whether, in line with Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy, his insurgent campaign can energize the party in the western states and other places outside the tired DLC playbook. I think we already know the answer to that.

ready on day 5,865

John McCain assumed office as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3, 1983. Exactly four years later, he assumed office as a U.S. Senator. If, somehow, he wins the 2008 presidential election, he would be inaugurated on January 20, 2009. I wonder if by then he will have found the time to learn about economics.

Five years after his first presidential campaign, McCain told this to the Wall Street Journal, as quoted in their November 26, 2005 issue:

I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

Brilliant. A presidential candidate who does not understand economics and says so to the world.

Today McCain gave his first major speech on the current housing crisis, and it is stunningly void of anything but platitudes. From the transcript at McCain's website, this is as specific as McCain gets about banking reform:

'When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.'

Transparency and accountability? Is that the best he can do? I'd say his education is off to a slow start.

Later today I saw Jack Kemp, a McCain supporter and Bob Dole's running mate in 1996, on MSNBC talking about McCain's speech today. Talking to host Andrea Mitchell, he said of McCain:

'John is a quick study.'

I recognize that most U.S. presidents in my lifetime have not been particularly bright, but, given the economic exigencies of the moment, perhaps we should be unusually vigilant against electing someone who, not only cannot tell Sunni from Shia, but also may not know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

Reader, I don't know about you, but I think twenty-five years in office is enough time to learn about economic policy. The kindest thing to do for McCain might be to send him back to Arizona so that he can get the education he so sorely needs. In another twenty-five years, he might be ready to run for president.

divine mystery

Here's something I have noticed that I have not heard anyone talk about: eight of the ten most Catholic states by percentage have chosen Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. The following list shows each state's Catholic percentage of state population, followed by the primary winner and outcome.

1. Rhode Island, 63%, Clinton by 58 to 40.
2. Massachusetts, 47%, Clinton by 56 to 41.
3. New Mexico, 41%, Clinton 51 by to 49.
4. New Jersey, 39%, Clinton by 54 to 44.
4. Vermont, 39%, Obama by 60 to 38.
6. New York, 38%, Clinton by 57 to 40.
7. New Hampshire, 35%, Clinton by 39 to 36 (to 17 for Edwards).
8. California, 34%, Clinton by 52 to 42.
8. Connecticut, 34%, Obama by 51 to 47.
10. Arizona, 31%, Clinton by 51 to 42.

So far, I have seen only one other blogger notice Catholic trending against Obama, and yesterday The Votemaster at electoral-vote.com noticed the disparity in Texas.

Clinton has only won four other states delegate-wise (plus Nevada and Texas where she 'won' but lost in delegates). Two questions then for readers:
-Why are states with large Catholic populations not voting for Obama? and
-Why hasn't anyone noticed this yet?

we are all Hussein

I don't know about you but I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama's name like it was some sort of cuss word. It is a national embarassment that American political discourse stretches so far to the extremes of xenophobia and puerility that a candidate's name can become an object of propaganda. I'm not worried about the influence of such people. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Republicans will learn that Obama is a bright, shining piece of rubber, and they are the glue. It just disappoints me to no end to hear it on the news day in and day out.

Jon Stewart made a clever joke about it when he reminded the audience at the Oscars of 'the ill-fated 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler' (at 8.10 of this clip at YouTube). Shamelessly repeating his name over and over with seven months to go before the election will wear out whatever rhetorical force it might otherwise have in certain quarters. It's also a good example of what I like to call the 8 Mile defense, i.e. claiming one's own possibly vulnerable traits before one's opponent even opens his mouth, as in the Eminem film.

I think we can do even better than that. It's not just people named Hussein who are being insulted by the racist xenophobes among us. It's everyone who respects human dignity and who values things like courtesy and etiquette. There's a tradition on the left of identifying with the targets of injustice by saying, I am [those people you hate]. It shows up in popular culture sometimes disguised as comedy, as in the 1997 Frank Oz film 'In & Out' starring Kevin Kline. When Kline's character, a high school teacher, is fired after being outed as a gay man, his students rise to his defense, one after another, by declaring, 'I am gay.' More recently, and more apt in this case, Le Monde declared in its front-page editorial headline on September 13, 2001, 'Nous sommes tous Américains'.

'Dans ce moment tragique où les mots paraissent si pauvres pour dire le choc que l'on ressent, la première chose qui vient à l'esprit est celle- ci : nous sommes tous Américains ! Nous sommes tous New-Yorkais, aussi sûrement que John Kennedy se déclarait, en 1962 à Berlin, Berlinois. Comment ne pas se sentir en effet, comme dans les moments les plus graves de notre histoire, profondément solidaires de ce peuple et de ce pays, les Etats-Unis, dont nous sommes si proches et à qui nous devons la liberté, et donc notre solidarité.'

It's time for some good old-fashioned solidarité. With that in mind, I am changing my name for the rest of the campaign to Jeff Hussein Strabone, and I will urge others to do the same with their names. Between now and November 4, I will always try to include my new middle name, even when it might be difficult to do so.

In a broader sense, the law-haters have been coming for the Husseins for the past six and a half years. Right now I think we've got the haters on the run, but we can't let up. Many Americans can be proud of their activities in the fight for justice and the rule of law in this decade. If we recall the famous 'First they came' speech of Martin Niemöller, we can say that many among us did speak up and, if nothing else, at least put our money where our mouth was by giving to the ACLU and other groups. What if they came for the Husseins, and everyone was named Hussein?

In the modern era, we have an exaggerated sense of the fixity of names because of the legal exigencies of having definite, unchanging names. It was not, of course, always the case. Just a few centuries ago, people would spell their own names differently with each signature, as is the case with all of William Shakespeare's surviving signatures. If we adopted a more flexible approach to our names, we might be more awake to the possibilities of self-reinvention.

The name Hussein comes from the Arabic noun husn, which the Hans Wehr dictionary translates as 'beauty, handsomeness, prettiness, loveliness; excellence, superiority, perfection' and so on. Reader, do you feel beautiful? I surely do, and I invite you to feel the same way. For the next seven months I hope you'll join me in saying, 'I am Hussein.'


[Update: here are some pro-Obama sites that have reached out since I posted this blog entry. Check them out.

The Obama Minute posts action instructions and news for Obama supporters.

I Am Hussein is a proposal for YouTube videos of people adding Hussein to their names.]

you can have him, we don't want him

Prediction: if John McCain becomes the Republican nominee for president, his running mate will be Senator Joseph Lieberman (CfL-CT). I have been saying this privately since last year, but today's report in the News-Times of Connecticut that Lieberman will 'quite possibly' attend the Republican convention suggests that he is already laying the groundwork.

It would suit McCain's empty 'maverick' brand to choose a running mate from the other party—if by 'other party' one means the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. To people who don't follow politics closely, it would probably look like a bold move to bring the two parties together and overcome the partisan rancor that supposedly accounts for government dysfunction. How strongly could conservatives object to a running mate as hawkish as Dick Cheney and as committed to the culture wars as Pat Robertson? And he would certainly add votes from Connecticut South, also known as Florida.

For Lieberman it would be a return whence he came. It's worth recalling the circumstances of his election to the Senate in 1988. Lowell Wiecker, the Republican incumbent, was a true maverick. Here is the first paragraph from the New York Times's coverage of the campaign for September 30, 1988:

'At a Free South Africa conference here last weekend, a crowd of liberals applauded the arrival of the senior Senator from Connecticut, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. They nodded when the rambunctious Republican from Greenwich reminded them that he was the first, and so far the only, Senator to be arrested at an anti-apartheid demonstration.'

The headline was 'Foe Slowed by Weicker's 2-Party Appeal'. Foe indeed.

It is hard to see how an anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-war candidate like McCain can claim the mantle of maverick. A sitting Republican Senator arrested for civil disobedience outside the South African Embassy? Now that's what I call a maverick.

Lieberman squeaked by with a margin of victory of 7,000 votes out of almost 1.3 million cast (NYT, November 9, 1988), or 49.7% to 49.0%, and the endorsements of William F. Buckley and other Republicans who found him more conservative than their own party's candidate. And Republicans did the same thing to re-elect Lieberman in 2006 after he lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont.

Whatever happens, the Democrats will surely pick up more seats in the Senate this year, at least six say I, and won't need the CfL Senator from Connecticut to caucus with them anymore.

One last point: earlier tonight I was watching Christopher Dodd, Connecticut's Democratic Senator, on C-SPAN2 filibustering against retroactive telecom immunity on the Senate floor. Dodd's father was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, and Dodd fils, invoking his father's legacy, has taken a hard line against abuses of power by the Bush administration. That doesn't make him a maverick, but in an age of wanton abuse of power and equally wanton cowardice by the opposition party, it does make him a hero. I'll take the hero over the maverick anytime.